Jair Bolsonaro's Southern Strategy:In Brazil, a budding authoritarian borrows from the Trump playbookby Jon Lee Anderson... In 2017, nearly sixty-four thousand Brazilians were murdered, an average of about a hundred and seventy-five every day. The economy, after several years of devastating recession, is virtually stagnant. Twenty-five per cent of the population lives below the poverty line of five dollars and fifty cents a day. ... “The country is overwhelmed by a terrible feeling that we have failed as a nation,” Gunter Axt, a Brazilian historian, told me. “And perhaps it is true.” ...Bolsonaro’s Vice-President, Hamilton Mourão, told me that his boss’s greatest virtue was his humble roots. “People have to understand, he comes from one of the poorest parts of São Paulo state,” he said. “He is a self-made man. He understands the problems of poor people, and he says what they want to hear.” ...Bolsonaro ... has said of the military regime that its “biggest mistake was to torture and not kill.” ...His ideas are informed by Olavo de Carvalho, a philosopher and a former astrologer who has attracted a following with eccentric interpretations of works by Machiavelli, Descartes, and others. Carvalho, seventy-one, lives in Richmond, Virginia, where he identifies with American “redneck” culture by hunting bears, smoking cigarettes, and drinking. ...Much of Bolsonaro’s political support comes from agribusiness, the arms industry, and the religious right, a nexus of power referred to as the Three “B”s—beef, bullets, and Bibles. ...[Marielle] Franco’s killing has led to one of the Bolsonaro administration’s biggest scandals, as the Brazilian press has noted links between suspects and the President’s family. ...There has been an alarming increase in homophobic attacks. Brazil already had the world’s highest levels of lethal violence against L.G.B.T.Q. people, with four hundred and forty-five murders reported in 2017. During the Presidential election, some fifty attacks took place that were directly linked to Bolsonaro’s supporters ...Indigenous rights and environmental policy are intertwined in Brazil: most of its indigenous territories, about an eighth of the country’s total area, are located in the Amazon, whose rain forest generates twenty per cent of the world’s oxygen. Under Lula, the government constrained commercial activity in the region, reducing deforestation by more than seventy per cent. ...During the three-month Presidential campaign season, deforestation surged by fifty per cent. ...For decades, Brazil’s indigenous-affairs agency, FUNAI, limited farming and mining in indigenous territories by creating reserves that were off-limits to developers. Within days of taking office, Bolsonaro transferred control of FUNAI to a newly created ministry led by Damares Alves, an ultraconservative evangelical pastor. The power to set aside reserves was given to the agriculture ministry, overseen by Tereza Cristina Dias, the former leader of the congressional farm caucus. ...Mourão often gently contradicts Bolsonaro’s positions. ...When I asked Mourão about his ambitions as Vice-President, he said, “I would like to head a new government center, so we can control the big projects, oversee what the ministries are doing. ...”“Has Bolsonaro agreed to this?” I asked. Mourão gave a noncommittal nod. “He is thinking about it,” he said.https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/04/01...

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